2001: 9/11, four U.S. airliners hijacked: two used to take down World Trade Center, a third crashed into the Pentagon; the fourth went down in rural Pennsylvania after passengers fought the terrorists

2002: Reporter Daniel Pearl kidnapped and beheaded

Currently, a decade after that murder list, in Libya, Muslims murdered our ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three of his colleagues, two of whom were former Navy SEALs.

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane refers to these current Muslim outrages as “Censorship By Riot” as he contends:

“If free speech means anything it’s the right to say and publish things that other people find objectionable and irresponsible, even blasphemous. Censorship is an affront to freedom whether imposed by official decree, or through a rioters’ veto – as the Middle Eastern mobs and those who set them in motion seem to want. …

“Meanwhile, Obama administration actions undermined its words about free expression. The White House contacted Google, which does millions of dollars in business with the federal government, and asked it to reconsider whether (the movie) ‘Innocence of Muslims’ might have violated YouTube’s terms of use. …

“Among the many threats that Islamic extremism poses to the West, censorship-by-riot may be the most insidious. We have been facing it at least since Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a kill-the-apostate decree against British novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989. It arose again in 2006, when Muhammad-mocking cartoons in Denmark prompted the sacking of Danish embassies and death threats against the artist. …

“We can’t slide one more inch down this slippery slope.”

But, I am constrained to ask: What can we do to bring this multitude of Muslim massacres to a halt and move away from that slippery slope? As this Washington Post writer noted, “Obama administration actions undermined its words about free expression.”